130 chApter fourI admit to being deeply pained by this stage, not only because it feels “final”
but because I am haunted by a feeling that I am failing her in companion-
ship. She is dependent on me now in ways that she was not before. And in
biopolitical fashion, I have claimed the right to treat her kidney disease and
high blood pressure medically, just as I will likely claim one day the right to
end her life. I feel tugged away from the humanimal bond we shared across
a decade and a half, a tug that is produced in part through the dependen-
cies of creaturely disease and aging, and a preemptive mourning for what
we once were.
This mourning for what feels like an increasingly distant humanimal-
ity is also located squarely within the specifically human productions and
performances with which I am now more than ever acutely engaged in
my roles as both mother and intellectual. As a mother, I find myself cease-
lessly crafting my child—at times quite discomfortingly—as a material,
ideological, and narrative being. While I urge her toward unconventional
ways of thinking (I am told that this is a “plight” of children raised by in-
tellectuals), which entail ways of conceiving our relations to others human
and inhuman that are in excess of and sometimes in stark contradiction to
empirical thinking, I also realize that I am raising her as a human subject.
My responsibilities “as” a mother sometimes feel in tension both with my
relation to Cassie and with my intellectual passions (which are more than
“just” intellectual) for unthinking my own claims to humanity. I am in the
odd position of having another human in my care who has from the outset
depended on me for survival, and whose sense of the world is being shaped
by particular performances of—and pedagogies in—family, community,
and citizenship that are geared toward being and acting human.
As an intellectual situated within the humanities, and currently pro-
pelled by the encroaching temporality of the tenure- track, there is no doubt
that I have become increasingly driven by certain modes of human mas-
tery—especially over myself—even while my intellectual thought is com-
pelling me to work against them. This became most palpable two years ago
when, hard at work on a text about Gandhi’s complex ethics toward the
animal, Cassie suffered the detachment of her retinas and became suddenly
blind. She howled and wandered aimlessly through the house, summoning
me with an urgency I could not interpret. I moved back and forth over the
course of hours between attempts to comfort her and the drive to meet a
writing deadline. I thought initially that she was suffering from the demen-